Here's the patent on a map of Washington, DC, at the location of the old Patent Office:

Another cool thing you can do is use a transparency slider to overlay a historical image on top of a Google street view of the same scene today. This shows a view from the old Patent Office toward the Treasury building:

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Here's a special Monday edition of our weekly news roundup:

Findmypast.ie, the Irish website that FindMyPast.uk introduced earlier this year, has added a feature that lets you build your family tree on the site for free (you’ll need to register for a free account with the site). According to the announcement, it’s the first step in the site’s development of a fully integrated family tree program where you can store photos and historical information.

Are you trying to save and share your family history by putting family stories down on paper?

Here's a great way to capture holiday-related memories: GeneaBloggers announces the return of the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories blogging event Dec. 1-24. Each day will present a blogging prompt (such as Christmas cookies—yum!) for bloggers to respond to with memories and family history.

Even if you don't have a blog, you can use the prompts to inspire your writing.

The Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories founder, GeneaBloggers' Thomas MacEntee, reports that some bloggers have compiled their posts into books to share with family.

RootsMagic 5 includes more than 80 new feature and enhancements to existing ones. New features include:

Timeline View: Show a person’s life in context with events from his or her own life and the lives of family members.

CountyCheck: Confirm the existence of a county, state, or country on any given date from a multinational database, and correct place-name errors in your family database.

Research Manager: Keep track of research goals, sources and results for a person, family or place in your tree.
“On This Day” List: View family events along with famous births, deaths and historical events for any given day of the year.

Media Tagging: Tag your images and other media with people, families, sources or places. (For example, tag an image of a census record with the people, families and places named in the record, as well as the census source citation.)

Learn more about the updates in a free "What's New in RootsMagic 5?" webinar Tuesday, Nov. 29, at 5 p.m. Mountain Time (7 Eastern, 6 Central, 4 Pacific). If you’re interested, click here to sign up ASAP, as attendance is limited. (FYI, RootsMagic usually puts recordings of past webinars on its website for those who missed them.)

The free RootsMagic 5 Essentials contains many core features from the RootsMagic software, and the two products are fully compatible with one another.

RootsMagic 5 works on Windows 7, Vista, XP or 2000. It’s available online or by calling 1-800-766-8762.

New users can get the software for $29.95. Users of previous versions of RootsMagic and its predecessor, Family Origins, can upgrade to RootsMagic 5 for $19.95.

Your boss told me it’s fine for you to use your lunch hour (plus maybe a few extra minutes) to shop online in honor of Cyber Monday. Honest!* Just make sure you add ShopFamilyTree.com to your must-visit list.

While you’re waiting to tuck into some sweet potato casserole today, take advantage of free shipping on all orders at ShopFamilyTree.com! It’s a great opportunity to start your holiday shopping and pick up a genealogy how-to book or CD for yourself.

The free Family Tree Magazine podcast November edition is here! Host Lisa Louise Cooke and Family Tree Magazine experts share tips on how to get relatives to discuss family history, a discussion of the Historic American Cookbook Project, and news on the Genealogists for Families project at Kiva.com.

Plus, learn more about creating a family history book from Family Tree University's Nancy Hendrickson.

The Thanksgiving Myth-busting patrol is here with the truth behind an annual seasonal event:

The presidential tradition of pardoning a turkey goes all the way back to …. 1989. Yes, George H.W. Bush was the first president to officially pardon his Thanksgiving turkey.

He sent Tom off to a Virginia petting zoo with the words “Let me assure this fine tom he will not end up on anyone’s dinner table. Not this guy. He’s been granted a presidential pardon as of right now, allowing him to live out his days on a farm not far from here.” (Thus ensuring that some other poor turkey ended up on the White House table.)

Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have continued the pardons. Last year, the two turkeys Obama pardoned (one was an understudy for the official ceremony) went to live at Mount Vernon.

In 1963, John F. Kennedy announced he wasn't going to eat the turkey he received, but he didn’t actually pardon it. Ronald Reagan spared a turkey, too, but merely joked about a pardon as he was questioned about the Iran-Contra affair.

I wanted to draw your attention to a post on Megan Smolenyak's Roots World blog about a disturbing change to the Social Security Administration's policy on fulfilling requests for relatives' for Social Security applications (called SS-5 forms):

The SSA will block out parents' names on the SS-5 you requested if the applicant was born less than 100 years ago and you don't provide proof the parents are deceased.

If you requested the SS-5 in order to learn those parents' names in the first place, of course, you can't prove they're deceased. And you're out the nonrefundable $27 fee you sent with your request.

You won't be able to search the census by name right away on April 2; instead, you'll need to know the enumeration district (ED) your relatives lived in and then browse the records for that district. You can find the ED if you know your ancestor's address in 1940 or in 1930.

Our publisher Allison Dolan has been slowly digging through the inherited family archive she's affectionately calling her "hot genealogy mess."

Thank goodness for our upcoming Organize Your Family Archive webinar and the advice from its presenter, Denise Levenick, because Allison's found some things she knows have historical value, but she's not sure what to do with. Here are some contents of just one of the two dozen boxes Allison inherited:

Maybe you've shopped at a Kroger grocery store? In 1883 in Cincinnati, Bernard Kroger founded what's now the largest US grocery chain.

Allison uncovered letters and newspaper clippings from Kroger family members. A handwritten notecard states that one of her ancestors was B.H. Kroger's private secretary from 1928 to 1938.

Another treasure is an album full of photos from the South Pacific. It belonged to a woman named Dorie, who may have been a friend of an aunt.

The interface is similar to the previous viewer, with some new and improved features:

Faster image loading.

Works on more platforms and with more browsers than the previous image viewer, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Web browser issues were preventing a large portion of Ancestry.com members from using the previous image viewer.

New tools, including rotating an image (handy for census returns with the address written along the side of the page), mirror (flips your record over so you're reading it backward, which I've heard can help with hard-to-read records), and new zoom controls.

Easy installation. Most people won't have to install anything (I didn't), though you might need to install a more recent version of the free Adobe Flash Player.

To try out the new viewer, click on the options button at the top of the current image viewer:

Under Verkler’s decade of leadership, FamilySearch has become a genealogy industry leader in enhancing online access to genealogy records through technological innovation and partnerships with genealogy businesses, records repositories and societies. Especially notable has been the FamilySearch Indexing project, which has mobilized tens of thousands of volunteers worldwide to index digitized records, making them searchable online.

Brimhall has held positions of increasing responsibility in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors FamilySearch. Before that, he was president and CEO of the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver from 1988 until 2005.

“I am very excited to help lead the work of FamilySearch, to continue the great things that have been done and move forward in new directions as appropriate,” he says.

In 1915, Rev. Sherman Coolidge, an Arapaho and president of the American Indian Association, declared the second Saturday of May as American Indian Day and appealed for recognition of American Indians as citizens (Indians were recognized as citizens in 1924).

Later that year, on Dec. 14, Red Fox James, a member of the Blackfeet tribe, arrived at the White House with 24 state government endorsements for a national day to honor American Indians. (Here's a photo from the Library of Congress.) He'd gathered them riding on horseback from state to state.

You'll also find indexes to the Final Rolls of Citizens and Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory, March 4, 1907 (known as the Dawes Roll) and Applications Submitted for the Eastern Cherokee Roll of 1909 (the Guion-Miller Roll).

Grandpa doesn’t know it—he passed away in 2003—but his old Army photos have graced several Family Tree Magazine publications. That's his portrait in the September 2005 Family Tree Sourcebook and on our Military Research Guide CD.

He served in the Army 83rd Signal Co. in 1944 and 1945 in France, Luxembourg, Belgium and Germany, and received a Bronze Star medal for his service.

…showed outstanding leadership in maintaining wire communications between division and regimental headquarters. During the rapid advance of the division, difficult terrain was encountered and artillery fire. His devotion to duty and outstanding services merit the highest praise …

My grandma once told me that Grandpa limped after the war because he’d dropped a big coil of cable on his foot, and she asked him why he hadn’t gotten it checked out. He said he knew he might not be able to return to the same unit. Those were good men, he said, and he didn’t want to leave them.

For example, you can stock up on Family Tree Magazine back issue CDs (the 2005, 2007 and 2008 CDs are just $4.99 each), or get guides to finding 15 important types of genealogy records in our Family Tree Essentials CD, also only $4.99. (Remember, VIP members get another 10 percent off.)

access to the webinar recording to view again as many times as you like

a PDF of the presentation slides for future reference

For a limited time, you can save 20 percent on your Organize Your Family Archive webinar registration. This may be the incentive and guidance you need to start getting a handle on your family archive—and seeing what genealogy treasures it holds.

Just wanted to let you know to keep your eyes on ShopFamilyTree.com this Friday: 11/11/11 comes only once a century, so word around the office is that we're marking the occasion with a "sale of the century." More details to come ...

The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (NYG&B) has a new website that's easier to use and enriched with expanded content. Additions to the eLibrary (accessible to members) include more than 500 NYG&B member biographies from the early 20th century, book two of the 1855 New York state census for Manhattan's Ward 17, 32 digitized books and more. Information also accessible t nonmembers includes research guides, News You Can Use with new resources for New York research and a Genealogical Exchange query board.

Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., an important Union fort in the Civil War, has been designated a National Monument. It was nicknamed "Freedom's Fortress" for Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler’s 1861 declaration that escaped slaves who reached Union lines would be deemed contraband of war and not returned to their masters. More than 10,000 enslaved men and women made the journey there by war's end. Learn about Fort Monroe during the Civil War here.

African-American genealogy website LowCountry Africana is an official partner with StoryCorps in celebrating the National Day of Listening on Nov. 25.

This will be the fourth annual National Day of Listening. Americans are encouraged to observe it by spending an hour on the day after Thanksgiving interviewing a friend, loved one or community member about their lives.

Lowcountry Africana will participate by recording interviews with residents in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. These areas are home to many descendants of enslaved Africans of the Gullah-Geechee culture. The slaves' rice-growing skills were vital to the massive rice plantations of the Colonial and Antebellum Lowcountry.

The records contain information on thousands of individuals including displaced Jewish orphans; Czech Jews deported to the Terezin concentration camp and camps in occupied Poland; and French victims of Nazi persecution.

World Memory Project contributors use software from Ancestry.com to index museum records. The indexes are free to search on Ancestry.com. The museum retains the original records and provides free copies of them upon request. To date, more than 2,100 contributors from around the world have indexed almost 650,000 records.

This month’s limited-edition Genealogy Keepsakes Ultimate Collection will help you share your heritage with loved ones. You’ll get books for recording family information and stories, plus ideas for creating heirlooms and family history gifts.

The $79.99 price saves you 62 percent on the whole shebang. Only 95 (and counting) of the Genealogy Keepsakes Ultimate Collections are left—now’s the time to get started on your family history holiday projects!

The Social Security Administration is making changes to the public Death Master File—the source of the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) that genealogists know and love to use—that’ll impact your research.

Effective today, Nov. 1, the Death Master File will no longer contain “protected” records the SSA receives from states. According to a notice from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), which disseminates the Death Master File, “Section 205(r) of the Act prohibits SSA from disclosing state death records SSA receives through its contracts with the states, except in limited circumstances.”

4.2 million of the 89 million deaths in the Death Master File will be removed, and approximately 1 million fewer deaths will be added each year.

I’m working on getting clarification on when and where the removed deaths occurred, and whether genealogy websites will have to remove those deaths from their current versions of the SSDI.

Update: The records now in Ancestry.com's version of the SSDI will stay, says spokesperson Matthew Deighton. "The
current records that we have on Ancestry.com will remain unaffected," he says. "We understand that we may receive fewer records from the Social
Security Administration, but it is not clear which record sets will be
impacted at this point.
We recognize the importance of these databases to the family history
community and will do our best to minimize the impact of this to our
users. Ancestry.com will continue to monitor this situation."

The changes are bad news for the genealogists who use the SSDI. Banks, employers and others who use the public Death Master File for security reasons—for example, to see whether an applicant is using a dead person’s SSN—will also undoubtedly be unhappy. (So, the Death Master File actually helps prevent identity theft.) Medical researchers use the database to track former patients and study subjects, too.

We receive Death Master File (DMF) data from the Social Security Administration (SSA). SSA receives death reports from various sources, including family members, funeral homes, hospitals, and financial institutions.

Q: What change is SSA making to the Public DMF?
A: Effective November 1, 2011, the DMF data that we receive from SSA will no longer contain protected state death records. Section 205(r) of the Act prohibits SSA from disclosing state death records SSA receives through its contracts with the states, except in limited circumstances. (Section 205r link - http://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/ssact/title02/0205.htm)

Q: How will this change affect the size of the Public DMF?
A: The historical Public DMF contains 89 million records. SSA will remove approximately 4.2 million records from this file and add about 1 million fewer records annually.

REMINDER: DMF users should always investigate and verify the death listed before taking any adverse action against any individual.

Halloween’s over, which means we’re in the holiday season. My blood pressure just went up a little.

Trying to take care of your gift list, keep family traditions going, get things done at work around vacation schedules, and squeeze in genealogy time can make the holidays one of the most hectic times of the year.

But they don’t have to be. Our colleagues over at Betterway Home are hosting a free webinar to help you cut the chaos, stress and clutter from your holiday season.